Other hobbies/Obsessions?

banie01 wrote: »

There are a couple of models here, in particular the German ww2 bits that were assembled and painted by a lad from Tipp that he was going to end up dumping as he was running out of space!

I was and am absolutely delighted to give a home to!

https://imgur.com/a/SXUI0oV

Wow, yer man did a great job! I hadn't built a model since I was a kid, but over the recent lockdown a good mate of mine who's into that(and great at it too) sent me over a couple of aircraft kits for me to have a go at. Steep learning curve. :eek: Though some of it came back. I remembered how much I hated painting the glass canopies. :mad: Then he gave me a loan of an airbrush and that made a big difference(brush painting them is a pain). Here's one near completion. I can see the appeal as it's relaxing enough.



A Ju87 Stuka from Airfix. Man they've gone way up in quality and detail from what I remember. The very first kit I can remember building with my dad was another Stuka with a big snake down the side. My dad knew an ex Stuka pilot after the war and I talked with him over the phone a few times when I was a kid so they always fascinated me. I thought the snake scheme was a made up kinda thing, as the German stuff is generally not as colourful as say the American, but turns out it actually existed. There were a couple of them apparently. Found the decals for it on eBay, though they're slightly the wrong scale, so other than the snake I used the rest from the kit. The worst scenario of "snakes on a plane" if you happen to be on the receiving end of one diving at you. :eek:

IrishPlayer wrote: »

Not sure if you have done this already,maybe an idea for another model would be a captured aircraft,something like this P-47 Thunderbolt

Funny enough IP I was tempted to do similar with the above plane. Like this one. I love the placard in front.



Wrong version though I could have done a captured Italian one.


Mad factoid numero 199962: In many movies where planes are diving out of control, they almost always use the sound of a Stuka siren for effect, though diving planes don't make that sound. A good example and with our boyo from Navan too(30 second mark).



After a while Stukas stopped making the sound as the siren drove the pilots to distraction. So they added whistle tubes to the bombs themselves and that's also used a lot in movies where you have bombs falling and again bombs don't make that noise. One of the first ejection seats was first trialled in a converted Stuka and when the Americans were designing the A10 tank buster jet they interviewed ex Stuka pilots for their input.

That's a fine bit of modelling for the clay furnace.:eek::) At the beginnings of the metal age the first guys to bring smelting of copper and later iron turning by fire lumps of stone into this new lustrous material never before seen in nature must have seemed like powerful magicians.

The ascent of man is a fantastic documentary.

Dead right on how fire changed us as a species and going back a million years with it. Cooking alone physically changed us as a species. Made our guts shorter, our teeth smaller, our stomach acid weaker. Then we used fire to harden wood, make the first compound glue and change the properties of the flint we worked. Kept animals away at night too, never mind allowed us to move to colder areas.

Well that's another hobby of mine I suppose. Early man, though Neandertals are my fave ever since I was a kid when I found one of their stone tools on holiday with my folks. I'd have over two hundred such tools now, going back as far as two million years, collected from different sources over the last few decades.